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Friday, 30 November 2012

Many of us know, or at least suspect that raising children in an
over-sterile environment may be harmful. It may reduce important environmental exposures
which build immunity by forcing the young immune system to do its job. It’s not a new idea either.

My father used to tell a story about a child in his street
who was never allowed to get dirty and would always bring his own knife and
fork if invited round to tea or to a birthday party. Of course he was also the least
healthy kid in the street. Dad would finish this story with.

You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die.

Stories like this don’t establish cause and
effect, but research does suggest that our levels of personal hygiene are
not
necessarily healthy.

Research indicates that
some of the products we use to avoid germs, such as antibacterial soaps, hand sanitizers,
and laundry detergents, may contribute to the development of conditions like asthma
and allergies. According to the FDA, the
hygiene hypothesis “suggests that the critical post-natal period of immune response
is derailed by the extremely clean household environments often found in the developed
world.”

According to a new study
by Dr. Erin Rees Clayton and her colleagues at the University of Michigan School
of Public Health, young people with overexposure to antibacterial soaps containing
triclosan may be at greater risk for suffering from allergies

The picture may be even more complex than we have assumed, in that exposure to low doses of toxins may be beneficial too. For example, Professor Edward Calabrese and his work on hormesis.

It is conjectured that low doses of toxins or other stressors might activate the repair mechanisms of the body. The repair process fixes not only the damage caused by the toxin, but also other low-level damage that might have accumulated before without triggering the repair mechanism.

In other words, low doses of toxins could be beneficial because they trigger repair processes. This is a controversial field due in part to its inevitable associations with homeopathy, but check out the video below.

Note what Calabrese says from about 01:50. He takes the assumption by Big Medicine that toxins have no safe lower dose and compares it with the rejection of the homeopathy - where it is claimed that super-low doses of certain substance can have a therapeutic step.

Whatever one's beliefs about homeopathy, this is surely an interesting argument.

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Climate isn’t weather we are told, but why? Surely climate
is merely averaged weather, so what’s the reason for this mantra – climate is not weather. Why is it so
important? Why does it crop up so frequently?

Think seasonal weather forecasts.

Climate forecasting grew out of weather forecasting, but everyone
knows weather forecasting isn’t particularly accurate even over a few days. So
climate forecasters have a problem. They don’t want their extreme long-range
guesswork to be compared to weather forecasts, particularly seasonal forecasts.

Seasonal forecasts are too close to climate forecasts.

This high level of public familiarity with weather forecasts
was always a serious weakness right at the heart of climate propaganda. Climate is not weather is an
extraordinarily feeble mantra dreamed up to tackle it. Even now it crops up
whenever this suppurating sore is probed.

Yet climate is obviously no more than averaged weather, so
the comparison is worth making, if only to highlight how climate forecasters
are merely playing political games. Seasonal forecasts are so dire, it isn’t
difficult to work out that climate forecasts are not even guesses, but
political aspirations.

Suppose UK weather forecasts are reasonably accurate over a
five day period, which is what the Met Office seems happy enough to publish on
its website. On the whole they aren’t particularly accurate over five days, but
let’s give the dear old Met Office the benefit of the doubt.

Now take the game of darts. For darts matches, the face of a
dartboard has to be 236.9cm from the face of oche. At this distance the game may
be played with great skill by professional players and strong amateurs.

So suppose we draw an analogy between the game of darts and 30
year climate forecasts. A 30 year climate forecast compared to a 5 day weather
forecast could be analogous to playing darts with the dartboard set up a little
over 3 miles away from the oche.

An outrageous analogy? Of course it is – it’s an analogy of an outrageous claim.

Apart from aluminium, the stuff we supposedly recycle isn’t
recycled at all – it’s mostly downcycled. Even aluminium is only recycled to a
limited degree.

Downcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of lesser quality and reduced functionality. Wikipedia.

Plastic.

In general, domestic sources of waste plastic cannot be
recycled. Most domestic waste plastic comes from food containers and for
various technical and regulatory reasons it cannot be recycled into new food
containers. Many plastics such as the almost ubiquitous polyethylene terephthalate
(PET) used to make drinks bottles have too many additives for it to be feasible
to melt the stuff down and recycle the melt into new bottles. It wouldn’t work.

However, PET can be reduced to flake, spun into polyester
yarn and the yarn can be made into clothing such as fleece jackets. This isn’t
recycling, but downcycling. There is no way back to virgin plastic.

Paper and card.

Paper and card contain fibres usually derived from wood. As
these materials are reused, the fibres tend to break up and shorten in length
so that the reused material is not as strong as the original. So ‘recycled’
paper and card have virgin material added to the mix to preserve their
properties. It’s recycling of a sort, but not dissimilar to downcycling in that the paper fibres cannot survive the process in their original state.

Aluminium

Aluminium, particularly drinks cans, can be recycled, by melting
them down to pure aluminium using considerably less energy than making
aluminium from the ore. In the UK we only recycle about 50% of our cans, but even
so, there is still that energy saving, which is probably the real value in recycling
aluminium. Fewer cans in landfill too. This is genuine recycling.

Glass

Glass was recycled in the old days when returnable milk and beer bottles were the norm, but not so much now. In general, much recycled glass is
actually downcycled into construction materials.

So why do we recycle?

Recycling as we probably all know, is a complex issue
riddled with politics and propaganda. It may well be that the most cost-effective way to deal
with domestic waste is to incinerate it, but environmental pressures render
objective analysis of costs, benefits and externalities particularly difficult.

I recycle and don't mind doing it, but that's because I have been conditioned to dislike waste and recycling feels right. It may not be the best solution, but it feels right to me, as I suspect it does to many others.

Yet my impression, is that recycling is mostly a political project. Another way to get behavioural control into the home and the classroom. Pointless drill.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

We’ve nipped off for a short break in the Cotswolds. A very
sudden decision, but Christmas looms and we have a few spare days. As we are
both retired, all our days ought to be spare, but that’s another story,

Anyway, here we are in Cirencester which is a very pleasant
sandstone-coloured place, if rather wet. We’ve been here a few times before in
the caravan, but this time we tried self-catering.

Yesterday we visited Tetbury, a little town chock full of
antique shops so we had a good browse. Lots of shabby chic, much of which seems to be
rather more shabby than chic, but maybe that’s the fashion. We didn’t buy
anything, but rarely do, it’s mostly the browsing we enjoy.

Apparently our Royal Greenie lives near to Tetbury – at Highgrove.
There is a Highgrove shop in the town centre too – pricey and not very
interesting. Shortbread packed in fancy tins at fancy prices – that kind of
thing. We bought a pack of Warburton’s crumpets from the Co-op over the road instead,
but that was pricey too. It must be Tetbury.

This remote whiff of royalty set me wondering what life
might be like if Charles ever makes it to the throne. My guess is – and it’s a
wild shot in the dark – not much different to now. Very much a non-boat-rocker
is Charles, in spite of the causes he espouses.

Whether he'll ever discover that climate science is a crock, I don't know. I feel a man in his unique position should have been too worldly-wise to be taken in, but he was. Still is one presumes. A disappointing man in my view.

As king, will he introduce new carbon-neutral modes of communicating with us? Semaphore springs to mind, although I've heard it suggested that he should try STFU. I don't know what the acronym stands for, but it sounds exciting.

We overheard a Tetbury resident complaining about the recent flooding and the local council. Apparently it issued free sandbags, but required payment for the sand. More than fair I'd say. Those bags may be the shabby chic antiques of the future.

While we were browsing the shelves of a bookshop, a guy came in with an umbrella and a pair of shoes in his hand - enquiring after local cobblers. I was by the philosophy shelf at the time, but didn't make the obvious comment.

I did find a copy of Walter de la Mare’s
Poems 1919 to 1934 though. I’ve blown hot and cold over de la Mare over the years. An
odd chap by any standards, but I’ll probably enjoy reading his poetry again. I had a couple of his books some years ago, but gave them
away when we moved house. I’m not really in tune with old Walter, but find him difficult to ignore.

I’m not – not in the modern, prissy sense of the word. Claiming to care
about ideas, abstractions and features of the natural world seems to be a
peculiarly modern take on the ancient game of sanctimonious one-upmanship.

If we're playing that silly, puerile game, I’m happy to admit that I don’t give a fig for the planet, environment, oceans, equality, health, coral reefs,
elephants, wildlife, rain-forests, the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Amazon,
endangered species, habitat loss and of course climate change.

"Come now, Count. You used to shoot lions in Algeria.""Well?""But why?""Why? The sport - the excitement - the danger!""And no doubt to free the country from a pest?""Exactly."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone

Not quite my take on lions, I'll admit, but times change. I am more concerned about corrupt governments and
transparency. I see these as rather more practical problems,
perilously close to real people who may indeed be forced to do something tragic - such as wasting their entire lives.

Corruption would be a good place to begin for the would-be
carer, but the environment is easier and more suited for impressing children
with the faux gravity of these distinctly political matters. The environment is easier to discuss around the dinner table without the need for lots of boring research, technical background or even common sense. Or common humanity for that matter.

Because of course it is
quite acceptable for adults to be embarrassingly childlike over all matters environmental. In fact it appears to be compulsory, especially for would-be celebrity bottom-feeders - if you'll excuse the expression.

I’m not so sure we have the stomach for teaching children
about corruption and transparency, valuable though the lessons might be. Particularly when we have some good
examples close to home.

The BBC lying to us about climate change for example. That would
be a cracking start for a child’s real-world education - or maybe the mendacity
of our politicians. I can’t see it happening somehow.

Duffuse, impersonal caring is the modern way. Caring about things that don't matter and not caring about those that do. Apparently it makes one a better person.

Sunday, 25 November 2012

I’m almost through the complete collection of Sherlock
Holmes stories. I’ve been reading them off and on for a while now, mostly
because I took my time, preferring to insert a few stories between
my other reading rather than plough through them from start to finish.

After all, the tales are rather similar in many respects. So
why do I enjoy them? I think there are three reasons.

When we returned to
Mrs. Warren’s rooms, the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into
one grey curtain, a dead monotone of colour, broken only by the sharp yellow
squares of the windows and the blurred haloes of the gas-lamps. As we peered
from the darkened sitting-room of the lodginghouse, one more dim light
glimmered high up through the obscurity.

On the land side our
surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors,
lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of
some oldworld village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of
some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record
strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes
of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife. The
glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten
nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of his
time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor.

Companionship.

For me, the relationship between Holmes and Dr Watson adds
immensely to the atmosphere of Conan Doyle’s famous tales. There is something
profoundly manly about it. Manly in an old-fashioned sense where intellectual
sparks mingle with a genuine warm regard. It's the manliness of a sincere handshake and a slap on the back.

When we share our thoughts and ideas, and do so honestly and
with due regard for the other person’s intellect, then we create a strong and
lasting bond. There is no doubt that Holmes held Watson in high regard, not so
much for his analytical strengths, as his feel for the emotional side of human nature,
something Holmes knew he lacked.

Maybe the home comforts of 22a Baker Street play their part here too – the
blazing fire, pipe-smoking chats and Mrs Hudson always on hand to mother them.

Freedom.

Sherlock Holmes’ world has barely sailed beyond living
memory, yet in some respects it is so far from our time that we barely
understand it. Yes, we know it as costume drama and we are told how little boys
were always being shoved up chimneys and upper middle class white men ruled the
world with an iron rod. The naughty bits our narrow, prissy world so
abhors – we know about those.

We know all that but we’ve forgotten the freedom. People
were more free in the nineteenth century than they are today, more reliant on
themselves, their family and friends. Yes they needed money to be free, but those who had it certainly were. A world where one travelled abroad
without a passport and dealings with the state were few and far between.

“Bring you revolver, Watson,” couldn’t be said today - couldn’t
be done. There is a whole world of lost freedoms in that single sentence, a
loss we are barely able to comprehend because most of us would rather
not.

It’s not just the guns and self-reliance, but the way prohibitions of vast
complexity have descended on us to such a spirit-sapping extent that we hardly realise what we
have lost. We have our own fogs - but not half so atmospheric.

We are not even free to tell ourselves what Holmes and Watson had but we don't. We could of course but we don't. It's not part of the narrative - what we threw away in a whole series of careless, wanton imbecilities.

I
think that’s the real appeal of the stories – the nostalgia. Not the silly nostalgia
of costume drama, but the nostalgia of a genuine loss we'll never repair.

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Suppose you are thinking about something complex. Much of what we care about is complex, so it’s one of those things we ought to do
well because we get lots of practice...

Well? We do get lots of practice and practice makes perfect doesn't it?

No?

The trouble with those precious complexities such as social trends, human relationships and so many, many more, is the way we have to choose an aspect first. To think about. To discuss. To ponder. To pretend we've resolved.

Almost always, or maybe always, we have to consider a limited aspect of a complex
subject rather than the whole thing. If we consider the whole thing we are deluding ourselves. Either that or we've taken up politics or climate science.

So let’s stick to aspects.

Now it seems to me that because aspects of a complex subject
are just aspects, they are best considered as neither true nor false, but
something in between. Contributions perhaps - useful or not useful as the case may be. Actually of course, they can be false contributions, but even false contributions tell us something. At the very least they tell us something about the contributor.

Aspects worth considering are surely those which clarify. Sometimes that can be as simple as a more useful word or phrase. But whatever we do, we can't consider all aspects at the same time, in one discussion or a single piece of writing or even a single book. Or even a library of books for that matter. Something is always left out or not given enough consideration or the wrong emphasis - because that's the nature of complexity.

So all aspects of a complex subject aren’t essential to all discussions. We examine a complex issue piecemeal - because we have to. Because we are not able to study, discuss or examine an infinite array of aspects.

Too often we listen to people or read what they say because
the aspects they promote are designed for emotional effect – designed to simplify and persuade, to encompass a subject which to too complex to be encompassed by anyone. Especially if we are willing to make certain assumptions, if we put ourselves into
a certain frame of mind, if we pretend the complexity is less formidable than it really is, if we look down on those who don't believe as we do.

Yet in reality these precious complexities are not merely complex but infinitely complex. They will be discussed and wrestled
with by thinking people forever.

Not for a long time - forever.

To me that’s one of the key issues with complex subjects – acknowledging just how complex they are, how they would take forever
to elucidate completely.

The issue of free will for example.

Intellectual modesty has its drawbacks though.
Too often the day is carried by those who seek to persuade over those who are
merely concerned to add another useful insight. So we are
carried away by the enthusiasts, the persuasive, the charlatans and the outright liars.

Which will go on until the day we gain control of our emotions I suppose. On that day though, we will have ceased to be human. So it's a complex problem.

Friday, 23 November 2012

A significant political effect of atheism and a general
decline in religious belief has been to facilitate a major power shift within
most democratic, nominally Christian countries.

Because Christian churches have been important social and
political power structures, their decline has led to a power vacuum which national
and international bureaucracies continue to fill, nook by nook, cranny by
cranny.

Taking the UK as our example, we once had significant dependencies
on ourselves, family and friends within a largely Christian milieu. Today, the
Christian influence has been extensively replaced by law and state-sanctioned
social norms, often with the connivance of fake charities set up for that
purpose.

This has created powerful, unidirectional political
pressures. Unless a political party is committed to the politics of the dependent
voter and state-sponsored social norms, it will not have the means to extend or
even consolidate its body of voters. This is the reality faced by the
Conservative party.

For example, unmarried mothers are semi-dependent voters. It
doesn’t mean they always vote in a particular way, but they will have a
tendency to vote in their own interests, as we all do. This does not imply
anything about the behaviour of specific unmarried mothers, it is merely the
logic of a political reality.

So for mainstream political parties in a modern welfare
state, it is politically beneficial to undermine the institution of marriage
and create as many unmarried mothers as possible. Again, this is merely the
logic of a situation facilitated by the decline in Christian social and moral constraints.

Politicians don’t necessarily “believe” in undermining
marriage, they are merely responding to political exigencies, step by step,
nudge by nudge. It is the logic of a situation.

We see the same logic operating in teaching, policing, drugs
policy, anti-smoking policies, the promotion of social norms and even concepts
such as motherhood and fatherhood. As religious influence declines in these
areas, there are political and bureaucratic opportunities for the extension of
official power and influence.

Golden careers have been built on fostering state-sponsored social
trends, so for many politicians and senior bureaucrats, atheism has genuine political
value. It reduces the power of potential opponents, particularly during the
manipulation of social trends.

This is not to say that atheists should go knocking on the
doors of the nearest church. We atheists are what we are, but we tend to be
naive about malign political trends facilitated by the decline of Christian
traditions.

Neither is it a suggestion that we should go back to where
we were, say fifty years ago or more - too many straw men lurk there. Yet in
losing one set of admittedly imperfect Christian values, we have gained a set
of malign political and social trends which promise to be considerably worse, and
where opting out is not an option.

As an atheist, it seems to me that traditional Christian
values here in the UK cannot be further eroded without a continued leakage of personal
freedom, sucked away by an ever more authoritarian state bureaucracy. Of course
many authoritarian atheists on the left welcome the consequences. Others seem
to live in hope that something will turn up.

Maybe something will turn up. Maybe an existing social power
structure will seize the opportunity of opposing the bureaucratic state.
Because it is an opportunity – the bungling, dishonesty and moral relativism make
it so. Who could make something of it though?

A revitalised Church of England? The Catholic Church? Islam?
If it does happen, it certainly won’t be libertarian atheists setting the social
agenda will it?

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I
was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch
at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word
are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit
pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a
pboerlm. This is bcuseaethe huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef,
but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was
ipmorantt!

I think I've seen it before because it stimulated the same thought - how important are spelling and grammar? To me they are fairly important because I was brought up to value them, but sometimes I mull over the question, especially when Blogger tries to insist on American spellings.

As for grammar, I have my copy of Fowler which I've even consulted from time to time, but language tends to drift quite quickly and it isn't easy to distinguish drift from error or doomed colloquialism. Blogs are a particular problem because of their temporary nature, so a slip or two is hardly a major failing and a touch of the colloquial avoids the sterile horrors of faux academic writing.

Whether or not we should be rigorous over these things I don't know, especially when so many other standards seem to be falling by the wayside (cliché) and blogs are written for whomever (wrong) happens to read them.

Our house is one of those 1930s bow-fronted houses you see
all over the place. It faces East/West so the rising sun is captured by our bow
windows at the front and the setting sun illuminates our kitchen and the room
at the back where we have our wood-burner.

What still surprises me is how much warmth we get through
those bow windows on a sunny day, even at this time of year. The morning sun can warm the front room from an overnight temperature of say 15°C to 19°C in a
couple of hours – which is at least as quick as the gas fire.

It’s similar at the back of the house where large windows
facing South and West gather warmth from an afternoon sun. A sunny day with an outside air temperature of 10°C warms the house while on a cloudy day at the same temperature we receive no perceptible heat at all. It all
makes me very aware of the importance of cloud cover. We all know about that anyway, but
the confusions of modern times sometimes pushes these basic experiences into the
background.

Our back room is an interesting room in that it is small and
very easy to heat. Other things being equal, the size of rooms is important as
we get older, because for obvious reasons, smaller rooms are more easily,
quickly and economically heated.

The back room was once a typical 1930s dining room,
accounting for its small size. We don’t use it as a dining-room because
we always eat in the kitchen.

Anyway, the whilom dining room has a large central heating
radiator. When we switch the heating on, it can warm from an unheated
temperature of 14°C to 19°C in about an hour. If I light the wood-burner at
the same time as turning on the heating, then after an hour the central
heating can go off and we have a room warm enough to sit and read.

The front room is only about 25% bigger in floor area than
the back room, so maybe other factors are involved, but room size seems to
matter when it comes to keeping warm on a winter’s evening. No, we’re not planning to downsize as we only moved a few
years ago. We seem to be well situated in that the house works well for us, but
for older people the issue is worth thinking about.

Small rooms are easy to
heat.

The really obvious examples of gains made by heating smaller
spaces are beds and clothing. In the UK, is easy enough to stay warm in bed
overnight in an unheated bedroom, simply via good insulation and body heat. If
the volume of trapped air round the body is small enough, body heat will do.

The same goes for clothing. Last winter we set off walking
in a temperature of -7°C, which in many countries is nothing special, but the UK counts as pretty chilly. We have the right clothing for these conditions and after about a mile or so were warm and comfortable, even up in the hills. It was still well below freezing when we sat down for lunch, but if you have the kit it isn't a problem.

So why don’t we just wear outdoor clothing all winter, even in
the house? Partly because it’s uncomfortable I suppose, and partly because in
the house we aren’t generally moving around enough to generate sufficient
excess body heat.

So I’m sure we could do more about housing design and the
advantages of smaller rooms, especially for older people. It’s not so much
about saving energy as making the best use of things we already know perfectly well. It's a pity that house size tends to be correlated with social status.

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Mr Palomar (recommended to me by Sam Vega) is a short work of fiction by Italian write Italo
Calvino. It’s a fascinating book, summarised by Wikipedia thus:-

In 27 short chapters,
arranged in a 3 × 3 × 3 pattern, the title character makes philosophical observations about the world around him. Calvino shows us a man on a
quest to quantify complex phenomena in a search for fundamental truths on the nature of being.

The first section is
concerned chiefly with visual experience; the second with anthropological and cultural themes; the third with speculations about larger
questions such as the cosmos, time, and infinity. This thematic triad is mirrored in the three subsections of each
section, and the three chapters in each subsection.

This summary doesn’t convey the subtly innocent honesty of Mr
Palomar’s neurotically enquiring nature. What am I to think, given my
limitations? What am I to do when faced with those inevitable frustrations Mother Nature always springs on me just as I begin to think I may be on the right track?

In fact the naive, detailed subtlety of Mr Palomar’s enquiring mind is
not easy to summarise without quoting most of the book, because Calvino
presents us with an extraordinarily human portrait which is at the same time
generic. We all have a Mr Palomar within us, but only to the extent that we are aware
of ourselves interacting so imperfectly with that delightfully impossible
complexity which is the natural world.

The book is almost excessively quotable too. Here are a few,
beginning with Mr Palomar’s baffled attempts to cope with the sight of a topless
woman on the beach.

He turns and retraces
his steps. Now, in allowing his gaze to run over the beach with neutral
objectivity, he arranges it so that, once the woman’s bosom enters his field of
vision, a break is noticeable, a shift, almost a darting glance. That glance
goes on to graze the taut skin, withdraws, as if appreciating with a slight
start the different consistency of the view and the special value it acquires,
and for a moment the glance hovers in mid-air, making a curve that accompanies
the swell of the breast from a certain distance, elusively but also
protectively, to then continue its course as if nothing had happened.

I particularly like this one, possibly because of how close it is to Spinoza's view:-

Or what if everything
that exists were language, and has been since the beginning of time? Here Mr
Palomar is again gripped by anguish.

And these two – the worrisome thought that there are things
we ought to know and notice about the natural world in order to become a rounded person.

When it is a beautiful
starry night Mr Palomar says: “I must go and look at the stars.” That is
exactly what he says: “I must,” because he hates waste and believes it is wrong
to waste that great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal. He says “I
must” also because he has little practical knowledge of how you look at the
stars, and this simple action always costs him a certain effort.

This observation of
the stars transmits an unstable and contradictory knowledge – Palomar thinks –
the exact opposite of what the ancients were able to derive from it. Is this
because his relationship with the sky is intermittent and agitated rather than
a serene habit?

This one is a favourite too.

“It is only after you
have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to
seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.”

Finally, an example of Calvino’s intriguing view of time.

A person’s life
consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the
meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but
because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that
is not chronological but rather corresponds to an inner architecture. A person,
for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes
him say, “How could I have lived without having read it!” and also, “What a
pity I did not read it in my youth!” Well, these statements do not have much
meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life
becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little
importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that
reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

Monday, 19 November 2012

Cold winds here today, which for some reason pushed me into buying another load of wood. We easily had enough for this winter and possibly winter 2013/14 too, but a little voice told me we can't have too much. Anyhow, we have the storage space.

I know we are not able to predict the climate and don't know if it will warm or cool - but I still bought another load of wood. Maybe it's something in the air - not just that cold wind.

Torchy, a battery toy, with the help of Mr. Bumble-Drop, a kind old Earthman, was rocketed to Topsy-Turvy Land - "a wonderful twinkling star where toys could walk and animals could talk; where the fields were full of lollipops, and cream buns grew on trees."

Crikey - I don't remember those cut-glass accents back in 1958. I lived on a Derby council estate, so I wonder why I didn't notice? Or alternatively failed to remember how the accents were nothing like mine? Probably because at the time I hadn't associated such accents with social class, but did associate them with the BBC. So maybe I didn't notice and therefore didn't remember. To my young ears they were just BBC voices, so not unfamiliar. I was also too old for Torchy, so maybe I just don't remember him all that well. He's certainly much weirder than I recall though.

I was more into the Lone Ranger, an American import which was a little more believable than Torchy. Maybe I could also imitate Lone Ranger accents without sounding silly to my peers.We seem to have a strange tradition of producing seriously weird TV programmes for children. It still goes on today as far as I can see. Mind you, traditional children's stories are pretty bizarre too.Do these mass fantasies stimulate the young imagination or render it unreliable? Was the Lone Ranger more dubious in that respect because it is closer to a possible reality?

Sunday, 18 November 2012

An extraordinary story from the Quatar
Gulf Times says the IPCC has not been
invited to COP18. Most of us know what a crock the IPCC is, but this is a real
surprise (!). If true, then some kind of power shift is going on. Maybe it’s
connected to this story from New
Nostradamus.

The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will not be attending the upcoming United
Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) in Doha, chairman Dr Rajendra K
Pachauri has said.

“For the first time in
the 18 years of COP, the IPCC will not be attending, because we have not been
invited,” he told Gulf Times in Doha.

COP18 is to be held
from November 26 to December 7.

The IPCC, which shared
the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, former vice president of the US and
environmental activist, is the leading international body for the assessment of
climate change. Currently 195 countries are members.

Dr Pachauri first
hinted about his ‘anticipated absence’ at COP18, while speaking at the opening
session of the International Conference on Food Security in Dry Lands (FSDL) on
Wednesday at Qatar University.

Later, he told Gulf
Times he did not know why the IPCC has not been invited to COP18, something
that has happened never before.

Following on from yesterday's post about Karl Friston's neurological work on how we act to
minimise surprises, it may be worth applying the idea to politics. Do we vote
for political parties because we judge them to be less capable of surprising us?

Maybe so. Human beings are programmed to seek out and
value predictability. It’s a key survival trait which seeps into every aspect
of our lives. The key attraction of big-government politics, is its promise of predictability through endless schemes of social control and the systematic elimination of surprises.

So libertarian and free market politics are unattractive to most people simply because they embrace the dynamism of unpredictable
outcomes. They promote the idea of adapting to and learning from surprises, but don’t seek to eliminate them. To many this is not acceptable - they don't want any surprises at
all, especially from their government.

Adapt and survive may well be what we evolved to do, but one
the whole we adapt by preferring predictable situations over unpredictable surprises. So it doesn’t actually matter how stupid governments are, what
matters is that they should be perceived as predictable and incapable of
surprising us.

Ed Miliband will not spring any surprises on us.

David Cameron may have a few surprises up his sleeve.

So unless circumstances change, Ed Miliband is likely to be
our next Prime Minister. He will of course be hopeless, but politically that
doesn’t matter too much. What matters is that his hopeless performance will be
unsurprising.

It's what most of us want.

In which case, there are aspects of human behaviour we can't change, but are only able to mitigate, however rational we may think we are, or could be, or ought to be. One of them is a natural tendency by government and institutions to build unsurprising social, economic and political structures. Many of us perceive these structures as authoritarian or totalitarian - because they are.

It seems to me that the problem we face is that this tendency is innate. It may well be the reason why civilisations fail. It may even be the reason why they will continue to fail - including ours.

Finally.
It's obvious I know, but Friston's theory, if correct, would also be subject to the goal of minimising surprises. I may like the theory because for me, it minimises surprises. The map is never complete.

In 2010, Professor Karl Friston wrote an interesting, if
somewhat technical paper about the Bayesian brain and work being done on unifying theories of
brain function. In simple terms, the idea is that the human brain functions in
such a way as to minimise surprises, which as Friston says are neural costs in
the sense that surprises have to be dealt with by non-routine neural activity.

This non-routine activity may be a change to our mental maps of reality or a change to reality itself - a change we make to physical environment.

We walk through a room and a chair is in our way - that is a surprise in the sense that alerts us to a mismatch between reality and route we are taking through the room - our mental map of it. So we move the chair or deny its existence - these are two of the remedies open to us.

So a surprise in this sense is a mismatch between our mental
maps of the real world and our sensory inputs - which has to be unexpectedly corrected.

Not a remarkable conclusion of course, because it is
consistent with survival strategies. When we adapt to an environment or
situation, we act to minimise any surprises it may spring on us. When we learn
and imitate others, we are acting to minimise surprises by doing what has been
done before.

We do a huge amount of surprise-limitation at the interpersonal level - constantly nudging the behaviour of other people towards our own comfort zones, while at the same time being constantly nudged ourselves.

It never stops.

It can be as subtle as failing to smile or as crude as a fist in the face. It's also government policy, because all government institutions want unsurprising citizens with predictable behaviour. The corollary of course is that we ought to see this kind of government behaviour as unsurprising.

Friston and others in his field are using this commonsense
view as a mathematical model for how the brain operates efficiently, how it
processes sensory inputs as efficiently as possible by keeping to a minimum
those inputs which require more than routine processing – the surprises.

If surprises occur then sometimes we act on the outside world in order to minimise future surprises. We move that chair to avoid falling over it, have the boiler serviced to avoid a breakdown, drink less alcohol to avoid a headache.

What interests me about this approach is the way Friston uses the simple word surprise to bring out how crucially important it is to minimise mismatches between experience and expectation. If his approach is sound, then this is the goal-seeking aspect of brain function at a cognitive level.

To my mind, this use of the word surprise also fits in very well with common sense – how
we differ in our attitude to surprise and our reluctance to
change either our ideas, our behaviour or the outside world. Although there is a loose end here, because there is such a thing as incompetence.

We attempt to minimise surprise in numerous ways.
Conventions, consensus, institutions, training, teaching, instruction manuals,
points of view, prejudices, braking systems, suncream, vaccinations and so on. The list is endless, because this is a very general idea.

At some point, if it hasn’t occurred already, somebody will
suggest that we vary in our tendency to avoid surprise.
Not that such a possibility would be surprising of course, but what if it turns out that
these tendencies differ between the sexes, between races and cultures and
across age ranges?

Some people may be –

Better at what we might loosely call administration –
surprise is minimised now.

Better at what we might loosely call exploration – surprise is minimised in the future.

Exploration in this sense is a search for new situations
where surprise is more minimal than the present situation, from building a
better mousetrap to proposing a new drugs policy to finding the Higgs boson. It's the search for better where better means more efficient, more predictable and therefore less surprising.

Obviously the potential for controversy is huge if it turns
out that men and women differ, if only marginally, in their propensity to avoid
surprises. If there are cultural or racial differences too? The outcry will be
formidable, but why?

Thursday, 15 November 2012

Foxconn plans to replace 1 million of its human factory workers in China with robots, and the first 10,000 have already been installed.

Last year, Foxconn President Terry Gou said he wanted to replace 1 million factory workers in China with 1 million robots. This was likely due to the number of problems Foxconn has had with human employees over the years.

The company came under fire earlier this year when The New York Times published a massive article on the working conditions of Foxconn factories. Apple was also targeted because the report mentioned Apple's lack of action when receiving reports on these poor working environments and overtime/pay issues.

The wood-burner has settled down to a pleasing flicker
of flame filtering through glowing embers. Drawing perfectly tonight, not too much wind in the chimney, not too little.

I switch on the CD
player. What type of music? Maybe some early jazz to liven the spirits? Something to tone down the pleasing but soporific glow of the fire perhaps? Yes - I think so.

Next, a glass of port, poured with care from the Victorian decanter. As always I admire its colour before taking a preliminary sip. I love the colour of port. Hold the
glass by its slender stem; gaze at the flames through plummy, raisin-scented shades.

Okay - the glass of port goes on the side table next to the decanter while I choose what to
read. The fire won’t need another log for a while so I’ll fetch my Kindle. I've finished Stephen Crane and polished off one of Thackeray's novellas, so it's about time I made a start on Mr Palomar as recommended by Sam...

Right ho, I'm all settled now. A glass of port by my elbow, fire burning well, curtains drawn and now for Mr Palomar on my Kindle...

who on earth is interested?
why does it have to be such a shambles?
what's the agenda?

I'd love to write a wise and revealing piece on this issue, but lack of credible information is curtailing my muse. It's not just that though - I also suspect there is a pretty obvious agenda. A possibility that the thing may be all about political control of the police is hardly a startling supposition. Anyone with a pulse and a brain cell could work it out. A further possibility that there may well be an EU link is scarcely any more pulse-raising either.

Do you intend to vote?

I don't. I'm a fairly punctilious voter for some strange reason which I admit I don't fully understand. It's not as if it makes any difference is it? But this time I tend to feel I shouldn't have any part in the vote. Not until I'm sure I know what I'm voting for, which I don't.

At least I know pretty well how the Parliamentary elections don't work and how I am able to use my pitifully feeble vote to throw a single grain of sand in the wheels by voting for the candidate most closely resembling a genuine maverick.

With this PCC game I'm not so sure. It feels fishy, but may not be and that's another problem. It may be an honest attempt to make policing more locally accountable.

Honest?

What am I thinking of! When was anything ever honest in UK politics? Why are the big three national political parties so prominently involved? So it's not an injection of local power into policing - we can be sure of that.

So I won't vote, because in this case an embarrassingly low turnout may have a little more political impact than that grain of sand. Well I can hope.

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Although this story is all over the major climate blogs and
many others, I need to post on it in case there is anyone out there who hasn’t
seen it.

You can read the story here, here and here, but basically
BBC reporting policy on climate issues was the subject of a key BBC seminar in
2006. Sceptics have always wanted to get hold of the attendee list for obvious
reasons, but the BBC has steadfastly blocked FOI requests even to the extent of defending this blocking decision in court.

Now blogger Maurizio Morabito has uncovered the list quite legally (apparently via the Wayback Machine) and we
see that to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the BBC and the BBC Trust have
been economical with the truth on their climate reporting policies. The BBC takes the activist line
and seemingly did so knowingly and deliberately.

As you may already know, A J Cronin, the writer of Dr Finlay's Casebook trained as a doctor before a
serious illness led to him taking up a career as a writer.

From Wikipedia:-

Archibald Joseph Cronin, MB, ChB, MD, DPH, MRCP (19 July 1896 – 6 January 1981) was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known works are Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years, all of which were adapted to film. He also created the Dr. Finlay character, the hero of a series of stories that served as the basis for the popular BBC television and radio series entitled Dr. Finlay's Casebook.

His first novel, Hatter’s Castle was published in 1931, but although it was an immediate success, his writing career was tested early by accusations of plagiarism.

Both novels are set in Scotland and revolve around the ambitions and pretensions of an unattractive central character, hatter James Brodie in Cronin's novel and carrier John Gourlay in Brown's. In each case, their success and supposed business acumen owes more to a bullying personality and lack of local competition than any genuine business sense.

Brodie and Gourlay eventually come to grief over their own wooden-headed stubbornness and exposure to competition from more astute business rivals.

I’ve read both novels, having sought out Brown’s novel after reading about the plagiarism allegations against Cronin. Certainly Cronin’s novel has some remarkable parallels to Brown's, but on the whole that’s because Cronin and Brown chose similar and unusually unsympathetic central characters.

Cronin's maternal grandfather, Archibald Montgomerie, was a hatter who owned a shop in Dumbarton. So that’s where the idea of a hatter came from, but even so, the similarities are striking and it is easy enough to believe that Cronin was at least influenced by the earlier novel.

So was Hatter’s Castle plagiarised? Nobody knows and it doesn’t seem to have affected Cronin’s career. All I take away from this long-forgotten incident is how easy it may be to use another person’s idea, either too closely or without realising, especially for those of us who read widely.

After all, we avid readers are supposed to seek out and be influenced by good ideas and good writing.

The biocide triclosan
has been around for forty years. It kills bacteria very effectively and
according to masses of research is very safe. So safe it has been used in numerous household products for decades. It has also been used in toothpaste as a preventative biocide for gingivitis, but there are concerns about persistence and its effects in the environment, so the pressure
is on as far as regulators are concerned.

Now personally, I’m not keen on long term exposure to such
chemicals unless the gains outweigh the risks which is so often difficult to establish. The problem for me is that the long-term
effects of triclosan can only be tested by long-term use. I’m not sure I
want to be a guinea pig.

Partly it’s an irrational response of course, because the
benefits of triclosan may well outweigh the risks – certainly the research
suggest so.

Anyhow, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to ongoing moves to remove
triclosan from consumer products. What I’m not so keen on, for purely personal reasons, is the low profile
way this is being done.

Suppose you suddenly find yourself suffering from persistent
and troublesome gingivitis. It turns out to be caused by a change in the formulation of your
regular toothpaste which you didn’t know about. After all, the toothpaste
carton still displays reassuring claims about the effectiveness of the stuff.

This happened to me a few years ago until I noticed the
sudden absence of triclosan from my preferred brand of toothpaste. There was no indication of any change on the pack. It was only by reading the list of ingredients (written in tiny, low contrast lettering) that I was able to link their dropping triclosan from the toothpaste formulation to my mild outbreak of bleeding gums.

Since then I’ve only checked this out on a very casual basis, but Colgate
Total seems to be the only triclosan containing toothpaste left on UK
supermarket shelves. Not a big issue, but read labels is my advice. There is a
lot of product information available these days, but I suspect people don’t
read it.

There is always the dentist of course. I resorted to a dentist in the end and now I'm using a toothpaste containing chlorhexidine costing about four times as much as my original, triclosan toothpaste. At least the gingivitis has gone though.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Is it possible for social and economic evolution to reach a stage where it is not necessary for people to understand much about the real world - where socially-approved fantasy worlds become more important than the real world?

Allow me to rephrase that introduction with a series of further questions.

Are we building fantasy worlds?
Are fantasy worlds our ultimate goal?
Will that leave us with fantasy players and fantasy managers?
And nobody else?

I think the answer to all of these questions may be yes with caveats. By automating agriculture and food production, by moving on to manufacturing, by adopting computer technology to deliver many key services, we have within our grasp a fantasy world where the exigencies of simple survival are held at bay and we are free to fantasize from cradle to grave.

This idea has been with me for years, as no doubt it has for many others, because we certainly put a lot of effort into fantasy. I don't just mean the electronic media, but the whole culture of allowing yourself to become a particular type of social construct sucking on the teat of the entertainment industry.

We are all social constructs of course, but we also have a degree of free will. What matters is how we use that free will - if at all. Which is one of the major points of course - free will is free - we don't have to use it.

But suppose you could enter a very convincing fantasy world - delivered electronically to your senses. A kind of online computer game with infinite possibilities all adjustable to your mood and general requirements.

Maybe it would be a little room installed in your house - about the size of a small sauna perhaps. The walls would be high definition screens and if would be equipped with surround sound and other sensory inputs, depending on the model you could afford.

It would be a place where you could lose yourself for an hour or two - rather like taking the Sunday newspaper to the toilet, but even more isolating from the real world.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

We recently bought a Kindle Fire specifically for downloading children's stories for Grandson. We have plenty of traditional children's books, but we thought the Kindle was worthwhile as we get on with the earlier devices so well ourselves.

It's basically a colour tablet computer with a back-lit LCD touch screen strongly linked to Amazon content. Very easy to set up, especially if you are already familiar with the Kindle. The display is crisp and easy to read and the pictures in children's books display well. All in all we're very satisfied and think it is reasonably good value for what we want.

But...

If you are interested in the Kindle for your own use, I strongly suggest you try before you buy. The e-ink shades of grey display on the traditional Kindle is lit by ambient light and in my view far more easy on the eye than the Kindle Fire. It's more like reading a book.

Kindle Keyboard - from amazon.co.uk

The Kindle Fire is okay for reading stories to children, but for a good long read I'm not so sure I'd get on with it. I certainly won't be using it myself. I manage to trash my Kindle I'll get another e-ink version.

It may be an age thing of course - younger people with younger eyes may not bother about the difference between the two types of screen. My eyes tend to tire after a long blogging session on the laptop, but not after a long read on my Kindle.

Friday, 9 November 2012

I’m no expert on American politics. I look on it from afar and I lack
the personal touch one acquires from watching the interaction of political personalities.
However, I do think that Obama’s election for a second term was predictable for
two reasons:-

The polls seemed to lean slightly his way.

The political world is not pro-Romney – even in the US.

Yes there are important Democrat-leaning complexities such as the Latino vote, but it seems
to me that for decades global politics has been shifting leftwards, but in a social as well as a political sense. It’s not so much a case of saying the right thing,
but of not saying the wrong thing. So much is now either off-limits or difficult to express, so the easy route is to say nothing - nothing substantive at any rate.So it's not so much a case of being the right type of
person as not being the wrong type. We vote against people rather than for them.

Kingsley Amis wrote a comic novel called Stanley and the Women. Stanley's ex-wife Nowell reacts to people in only one of two ways. If they give in to Nowell's every whim, they are being nice. If they don't give in to Nowell's every whim, they are being nasty. Modern voters have a lot in common with Nowell. There is nothing even faintly sophisticated about voting and I'm not convinced there ever could be. Keep it crude - nice or nasty - that's the real political dichotomy. Sharp businessmen such as Romney are simply the wrong type. Of course many Americans don't see it that way, because it was a close election and Obama only just made it. Maybe the thing was also influenced by externals such as Sandy – maybe that very public whiff of executive concern was just enough to shift the
balance. Who knows.

In the UK, the Conservative party has for years tried to divest itself
of thenasty partyimage, the party where hard choices are
presented and confronted. Increasingly people don’t want hard choices to be mentioned, let alone confronted. They want to hear about soft options,
prefer muddling through, like to be organised and to organise others.

Ours is becoming a strange domestic world, cut adrift from the past.

It’s been going on for decades, this rise in domesticity as a way of enfolding social, political and economic issues in a peculiar domestic embrace. The clues are
everywhere, from the obsessive tidiness we euphemistically callrecyclingto the nice clean electric cars which might
just as well have anElectroluxbadge, because that’s what their proponents
really want. Plus maybe a vacuum cleaner attachment to keep the roads clean.

Smoking is being stamped out because it’s seen as a nasty, dirty habit indulged in by dodgy people, those who don't conform. It's nothing to do with health - people don't give a rat's arse for your health, but they do
want you to be clean and presentable in public. Nobody must be left out either, no cranks
in the corner, no people who pop up to say nasty things they should have
kept to themselves.

Alcohol is going the same way because nice people only ever drink in
moderation and only ever in the evening. Even then it will be a nice wine rather than a stiff drink. You know what I mean too - unless you happen to be a thoroughly nice person.

Gifts are particularly nice. The political left goes very big indeed on gifts - particularly the delightful notions of choosing and receiving more than you give. The politics
of gifting is a major feature of left-wing politics - helping yourself to the cake you didn't bake, lovely gifts slipped through as gold-plated pensions, sinecures, subsidies and grants. Year-round Christmas is what it's
all about. As to the vexed question of how Santa fills his sack - well we are too nice to discuss that.

We don’t like our powerful people to seem powerful and successful,
but nicely spoken and considerate – inoffensive to a fault - one of us almost. If there are nasty decisions
to be made then we don’t want to hear about it. Those things should be sorted out
behind closed doors – nicely. Tea and biscuits helps.

Niceness is what it comes down to and the left does niceness very well. Desperately superficial it may be, but niceness is so often superficial because that’s a key
part of being nice. Thinkers are not quite nice. They may be pleasant enough
in their own way, but never nice, always tainted with that shadow of doubtful opinions, always
prone to say something awkward, difficult or clever. Thinkers are conversation stoppers – we don’t want
them round the dinner table.

Obama didn’t even have to portray himself as nice – which he isn’t
of course. He merely had to present himself as nicer than Romney.It’s how the left hoovers up votes and will continue to do so. Even in the US.